Canada: "A motion to reopen the issue of same-sex marriage was quickly rejected by Canada's House of Commons Thursday afternoon."
Sweden: "The Swedish Lutheran Church announced Wednesday that as of January same-sex couples will be able to have their unions blessed in any of its congregations throughout the country. Until 2000 it was the state religion and has 7.2 million members out of a total population of nine million."
Italy: "Italy's Senate on Thursday passed a motion calling on the government of Prime Minister Romano Prodi to bring in legislation creating civil unions for gay and lesbian couples."
Australia: "The South Australia parliament passed legislation Thursday granting same-sex couples most of the state rights accorded to opposite-sex married couples. The bill passed 16 - 3 in the upper house, bringing South Australia in line with the country's other states."
United States: "Comments Governor Mitt Romney made during his 1994 Senate bid, in which he said the gay and lesbian community 'needs more support from the Republican Party,' resurfaced yesterday, posing a potential hurdle as he appeals to conservatives for a probable presidential campaign. ... [Now Romney is] one of the most aggressive backers of a proposed gay-marriage ban aimed for the 2008 ballot."
Hmm. Which one of these things doesn't belong...?
Gay Global
RIP Jeane Kirkpatick
Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, an apostle of Reagan era conservatism and a hardass to whom her former American Enterprise Institute colleague, John Bolton, has been compared, has died.
I was not a particular fan of Ms. Kirkpatrick's, although she was the first woman US ambassador to the United Nations, which is pretty cool.
Science is Fun!
And what’s your science project, Sally?
Well, first I put this colored liquid on my fingernails and let it harden, and then I put this, like, totally sciencey elixir on it, and a supercool chemical reaction happens, and then—zow!—my fingernails are clear again.
So…your science project is nail polish remover?
Uh-huh. I learned all about it with my Discovery Channel Store Deluxe Nail Salon for girls!
Mike the Mad Biologist is wondering if the Discovery Channel Store is being “run by sexist pigs,” and after reading his post and wandering over to the site myself, I’m beginning to wonder the same thing.
A colleague looking to buy Christmas gifts went to the Discovery Channel store page and noticed that boys and girls had two different pages. It's nice to see that a company supposedly dedicated to scientific inquiry has decided that girls don't like or want science.
Compare the first five items offered for boys:
~ Discovery Whodunit? Forensics Lab
~ Discovery Fingerprint Lab
~ Discovery Speed Detector
~ Radio Control Equalizer Stunt Car
~ Discovery Remote Control Chromashift Roboreptile
…to the first five items offered for girls:
~ Discovery Ultimate Pottery Wheel
~ Discovery Knit Kit
~ Discovery Deluxe Nail Salon
~ It's My Life Scrapbook Kit
~ Discovery Friendship Bracelets
Mike notes “you have to get to the bottom of the girls page to see the ‘Discovery Whodunit? Forensics Lab’—the first item for the boys,” and also questions whether Marie Curie played with Jelloopdeloops. Well, pre-feminism, science wasn’t so much about accessorizing as it is now! Duh.
What’s actually most telling about the disparity between the boys’ and girls’ sections are the items that don’t make the crossover between the two at all. Beyond age 12, there’s no division by sex for teens and adults, so why the separation for kids under 12? Considering the vast majority of the stuff is listed on both pages, it doesn’t seem to make much sense.
Until, that is, you consider how patently absurd it would be to offer a toy nail salon as an “educational toy” in a non-gendered context.
The girls of Central High show off their love of science.
Only seen through the prism of sex-separatism does all of the other completely unrelated-to-science crap being marketed to the girls—Make Your Own Twirly TuTu, Twist & Wrap Style Hair Salon, Jewelry Keeper, Fairyopolis Book, Hand-Powered Button Maker—seem passably “educational” to the uncritical eye. As expected, the stuff exclusive to the boys’ section—bug catchers, erector sets, horror balls (grody!)—are things that shouldn’t be considered sex-specific, but are, simply to offset the surfeit of pink rubbish being hawked to girls under the pretense of science.
Question of the Day
Quick and Dirty Background: In the 1886 case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, the SCOTUS ruled that a corporation is a person and entitled to the legal rights and protections afforded to any person by the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. The decision was made on the premise that states could not deny equal protection to any person within its jurisdiction, but corporations have since used their identification as persons to argue for the expansion of all sorts of rights, including the right to “free speech” which they claim would be denied by legislation limiting corporate donations to political candidates.
All that said, Shaker Jeff wants to know what you think about the Democrats proposing a Constitutional amendment delineating that corporations are not persons and financial contributions of any sort are not speech.
Abstractly, do you support it? Concretely, could something like that pass? What are your thoughts? Have at it.
The Weblog Awards
Voting begins tonight for the 2006 Weblog Awards, as soon as they get all the polls posted. You can vote once every 24 hours in each category for the next week or so.
There are a lot of Shakers and friends of this blog who are nominated (thanks to Misty for pulling the list together), so I’ll be reminding everyone to go vote for their favorites over the next few days.
Shakes is nominated in the Best Liberal Blog category. We’ve got about one-billionth the traffic of most of our competitors, so the Shakers will have to be voting maniacs if we’re to avoid a sound trouncing!
Curiosity Won’t Kill This Cat
Because he is one incurious mofo:
[Retired diplomat and ISG panel member Lawrence Eagleburger] said after the event that when the group met with Bush, "I don't recall, seriously, that he asked any questions."Bits and pieces of Bush’s response to this thing have been dribbling out over the past two days, and they’re frankly incredible, even to someone like me who thought she’d lost all capacity to be shocked by anything he did.
“To show you how important this report is, I read it.” still takes the cake, but the fact that he asked nary a question of the Iraq Study Group is truly amazing.
(Via.)
Hitchens Has Defenders
Recently received in my inbox, with last name and email address redacted because I’m nice that way:
From: Tom
Date: Thursday, December 07, 2006 2:28 PM
To: Shakespeare’s Sister
Subject: Response re. Chris Hitchens
Lady (if I might so abuse the term in addressing you),
[Excerpts my post Christopher Hitchens: Minister of Funny.]
It seems to me that your hatred is very deep and real, and more directed at Chris than at a piece of literature. Get a life!
I appreciate women's humor and comediennes as well as men's. True, much of men's humor is sophomoric and sometimes downright demeaning. At the same time some of Chris' comments are also true.
But why get your britches in such a twist? To take such an article so personally or somehow take it as your personal cause to rail against does yourself no favors. Find something better and substantive to tilt your lance at rather than the spinning windmill of some guy just giving us a perspective.
Come on. It's the holidays. Have an egg nog!!!!
Tom’s really opened my eyes. I have to admit what a fool I’ve been, seeing him be so totally right in so many ways:
1. I am not a lady and I am deserving of insult for having strong opinions.
2. I’m in need of "a life" because I dislike people who make sweeping and offensive generalizations about women.
3. I am also in need of "a life" because I carelessly directed my critique not at the article itself, but its author. A big faux pas indeed, but hopefully my lifelessness will serve as an acceptable justification for not understanding Hitchens neither develops nor endorses the ideas in the pieces of literature he produces, but is instead simply a conduit through which they flow from the ether and onto the page.
4. Some of Hitchens’ comments are true; therefore, there is no use in pointing out the ones that aren’t.
5. Being a woman who takes personally an article which maligns all women is silly.
6. Taking an article which maligns all women as my "personal cause" on my personal blog does me no favors. I should probably see what Tom’s causes are and write about those.
7. A prominent male essayist who uses his paid platform in an internationally renowned publication to make sweeping generalizations about women is "some guy just giving us a perspective." I, on the other hand, a smalltime blogger with no name recognition who represents only my own view and interests, should "find something better and substantive" at which to tilt "my lance." (Note: I have a cooter; not a lance.) Hopefully, Tom will find this post more to his liking.
Thanks for the enlightening tips, Tom! I’ll pass on the eggnog, though. I find it a wee bit "cummy."
Caption This Photo
George W. Bush, speaking today on the Iraq Study Group report: "The truth is a lot of reports in Washington aren't read by anybody. To show you how important this report is, I read it." Asked whether he's still in "denial" about Iraq, Bush shot back: "It's bad in Iraq. That help?"
Found at Salon by Constant Comment, who says, "IMHO, I believe the man has gone from delusional to deranged…"
News Flash: Knucklehead Manages to Bang Out Column with Forehead
Michael Medved, Townhall's biggest pinhead, has written one of the dumbest things I've ever read.
No, seriously. It's that dumb.
See, he's trying to raise the old, tired "gay marriage = special rights" canard, but his efforts are so sloppy and senseless, you almost have to feel sorry for the guy. Almost.
He does some hand wringing over Ted Haggard and others that have been caught indulging their taste for that same-sex forbidden fruit. He spouts some "no one would be as ready to forgive these people if it were a heterosexual affair they were involved in" ridiculousness. Apparently, people like it when media figures have gay gay gay affairs... it's those damn hetero affairs that are verboten!
In high profile cases, in other words, we seem far more willing to forgive and forget faithless behavior if that infidelity involves a homosexual connection. This amounts to the granting of a special dispensation, a privileged position, to same sex attraction—giving more latitude to gay relationships than we’d ever grant to straight romances. The justification for this attitude involves the notion that gay men who leave or destroy their families for the sake of homosexual affairs are simply discovering, at long last, their true identities after years of repression– coming to terms with “who they really are.”Yeah, all those closeted, self-hating gays get all the breaks! They never get publicly humiliated or lose their jobs! Meanwhile, poor Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani had all kinds of affairs, and they never hear the end of it! Why, they don't dare show their faces in public! And poor Jimmy Swaggart... his apology fell on deaf ears!
...ahem.
Spinning wildly, Medved then burbles:
One of the most common arguments for gay marriage also carries with it the implicit assumption that gay relationships count as inherently superior, more durable and more meaningful than their straight counterparts. Andrew Sullivan and many others advocate governmental endorsement of same sex marriage as a means of encouraging more responsible, monogamous behavior on the part of gay males, with their acknowledged tendencies toward promiscuity as part of the notorious and dysfunctional “bath house-and-leather bars” culture. In other words, all that homosexual guys need in order to give up lives of often reckless recreational sex is the right to a wedding license and a traditional marriage.Yeah, advocates of gay marriage are always pushing that "inherently superior" meme when they ask for "equality." Because the definition of "equality" is "we get more than you." Hey, wait... he used the "special rights," the "all gay men engage in reckless sex lives" and the "all gay men go to bath houses" clichés in just one paragraph. Wow. He hit the trifecta. Someone should give Medved a medal. A really old, used up one.
Then he grabs the wheel, slams it to the right, and heads right into wackyland:
But the advocates of same-sex matrimony fail to explain why the institutions and practices which they believe will work so well in solidifying relationships in their community have failed to function with similar effectiveness for heterosexuals. Gay rights advocates find themselves in the odd position of arguing that legally sanctioned marriage will work better at improving and enhancing homosexual intimacy than it has in strengthening the straight partnerships for which it was designed. In fact, champions of marital redefinition love citing the baleful example of Britney Spears, asking why the pop star should be entitled to two brief, failed, ill-considered marriages, while more responsible and mature gay people can’t win approval for even one. Critics of the status quo also deride those of us who say we’re trying to defend traditional marriage –pointing out that the high divorce and infidelity rate makes it questionable whether this old concept of matrimony is even worth defending.So.
Yet these same gay rights activists continue to claim that the same institution that has failed to uplift or preserve the relationships of so many heterosexuals, will work magically to enrich the lives of gays. The assumption behind these contradictory arguments seems to be that homosexual relationships are somehow inherently more worthy, conscious, generous, mature and capable of refinement by marital institutions than their unthinking, straight equivalents.
Medved is actually arguing that gay marriage with never work, because straight people can't make it work. And when a homosexual says "hey, I'd like the same rights that you have, after all, why should one person be allowed to go through marriages like potato chips and we're not even allowed a chance," what they're really saying is, "I'm better than you, straight person!"
He then throws a little more gasoline on the fire by sputtering some more tired old crap; you've heard it all before... equating gay marriage to nymphomania or porno addiction... "Man on Dog" Santorum would be proud. But really, he can't top that paragraph above.
We can't make it work, so why should you be allowed to, faggot? Quit getting so uppity!
As the national argument continues to rage regarding the proper social and governmental response to homosexuality, some of the advocates for radical change have unobtrusively but unmistakably shifted their campaign from a request for equal treatment to an assertion of innate superiority. They demand for gay impulses not the same treatment accorded to heterosexual desires, but far greater latitude and acceptance, along with uniquely privileged social sanction and legal endorsement.
Wow. My hat's off to you, sir. You are the Grand Poobah of Duh.
(Via Sadly, No!, who shortened Medved's "column" to:
"Advocates for gay marriage say it would encourage homosexuals to be monogamous, but why hasn’t it worked for heterosexuals? Wait – that’s not what I meant! Homosexuals think they’re better than you!"As the kids say, Heh, indeed.)
(I'll be amazed if I'm able to cross-post. Blogger is teh suck.)
In case anyone was under the misapprehension…
…that President Myway O’Thehighway was actually going to start doing things differently on the basis of the ISG report, he isn’t.
Asked if Baker would help implement the report, a spokesman for Mr. Bush said, "Jim Baker can go back to his day job."Ouch. Hasn’t G-Dub ever heard the aphorism about not biting the hand that tries to pull your ass out of the fire for the nine millionth time in your pathetic, useless catastrophe of a life?
Lame Duck and a Lead Balloon
The Bush administration is considering doing away with health standards that cut lead from gasoline, widely regarded as one of the nation's biggest clean-air accomplishments.Sure they have. And if babies and old people and other people particularly vulnerable to lead had the same lobbying power, maybe we’d give a shit about what they thought, too! Honestly, is there no limit to the amount of corporate cock this administration will suck?! Don't answer; that's rhetorical.
Battery makers, lead smelters, refiners all have lobbied the administration to do away with the Clean Air Act limits.
(Fun Fact: A coroner for the county in which I live, which contains several influential steel mills along Lake Michigan, says the air here is so polluted, he can’t tell whether the dead were smokers or non-smokers, because all of our lungs are equally black.)
A preliminary staff review released by the Environmental Protection Agency this week acknowledged the possibility of dropping the health standards for lead air pollution. The agency says revoking those standards might be justified "given the significantly changed circumstances since lead was listed in 1976" as an air pollutant.Awesome. The standards are working…so let’s get rid of them. Evidently, the only reason we implemented those standards was to get the lead concentrations down to a level where Big Bidnez can start polluting again without killing off most of their human resource.
The EPA says concentrations of lead in the air have dropped more than 90 percent in the past 2 1/2 decades.
I’m no anti-capitalist, but I’m sick to death of hearing about what’s good for business and what’s good for the market and what’s good for corporations and what’s good for profits and how genuflectingly grateful American workers are supposed to be just for being part of the Super Mega Molto Awesome American Economy, even as every last scrap of benefit once conferred by being a part of the American workforce is taken away from them—and the quality of their air, water, and land is sacrificed, shortening their lives and giving them less time to enjoy any pittance of reward they earned themselves in a lifetime of slavery to a behemoth enterprise that cannot care for them or even learn their names.
FUCK!
(H/T Oddjob.)
Soft Bigotry, Meet Low Expectations
Wow, it must be awesome to get credit for only being an asshole and not a total asshole. An article in the LA Times on Mary Cheney’s Big Fat Lesbian Pregnancy is titled "A pregnant pause in right wing" (ho ho) and subtitled (emphasis mine) "Social conservatives remain silent or temper their criticism about news that Cheney's gay daughter is expecting." Later in the article, "groups that oppose same-sex marriage and gay adoptions" are credited with using "a delicate touch not always seen in the political wars over gay issues" in their criticism.
How nice. It’s always so generous to use a delicate touch when criticizing someone else’s personal decisions that have nothing to fucking do with you.
Anyhow, check out this magnanimously tempered criticism and thoughtful employment of a delicate touch:
"Not only is she doing a disservice to her child, she's voiding all the effort her father put into the Bush administration," said Janice Shaw Crouse, senior fellow at the Beverly LaHaye Institute, the think tank of Concerned Women for America.Mary Cheney is a terrible daughter and will be a terrible mother. Delicate. Temperate.
Crouse also described Cheney’s pregnancy as "unconscionable," but I guess that didn’t fit into a story about how delicate and temperate the rightwing is being.
"Children deserve the very best we can offer, and gay adoption — by definition — intentionally denies children either a mother or a father," said Carrie Gordon Earll, an analyst for Focus on the Family, the Colorado-based family advocacy ministry. "Adoption laws should put the needs of children first, above the desires of adults."Mary Cheney is a selfish dyke who will be a terrible mother to a pitiable child. Delicate. Temperate.
Earll also said, "Just because you can conceive a child outside a one-woman, one-man marriage doesn't mean it's a good idea. Love can't replace a mother and a father."
Of course, even a mother and a father can’t replace love, so I’d say any child is better off with two loving parents of the same sex or one loving parent of either sex than two parents of opposite sexes who treat their kids like shit. Although I wouldn’t expect anyone working for Dr. James Dobson to recognize anything short of Being Gay While Parenting to be abuse, considering he not only believes that misbehaving children should be spanked, but also that a child’s time crying after being punished should be limited "by offering him a little more of whatever caused the original tears" because extended crying by beaten children is a "protest aimed at punishing the enemy." When abuse is your foremost parenting strategy, it’s no wonder you argue that "love can’t replace a mother and a father," rather than the other way around. Fucking assholes.
Oh my. Was that indelicate and intemperate of me?
Poverty: Rockin’ the Suburbs
Twelve million American suburbanites are living in poverty, outnumbering the urban poor for the first time ever, as the poverty rate levels off at 12.6% “after increasing every year since the decade began.”
It shoud be noted that the poverty rate in cities is still higher—18.8% vs. 9.4% in the burbs—but the number of people in poverty is higher in suburbia and quickly growing for several reasons, including suburban growth outpacing urban growth and recent immigrants who “on average, have lower incomes than people born in the United States” now “increasingly bypassing cities and moving directly to the suburbs.” And then there’s the issue of the quality and variety (or lack thereof) of suburban jobs; to be sure, there are low-wage jobs in cities, too, though cities tend to provide a more comprehensive spectrum of opportunities. There are more entry-level white collar jobs (mail clerk, receptionist) with good healthcare benefits in any city than there are in the suburbs, so someone clever but not degreed may do better in the city than in the burbs, where Wal-Mart might offer the best job options going.
At one time, not so long ago, people in the service industry—waiting tables, working retail—may have had a better standard of living in the suburbs, but now, with suburban living predicated on having a car, and regularly filling that car with gas, more and more of a suburban paycheck goes toward just getting to and from work. Public trans in the city remains pretty damn cheap—and in a northern city like Chicago, where many apartments have radiator heat included in the rent, not having to pay ghastly winter heating bills in suburban apartments with forced air is another bonus of city living. People are leaving the city to escape poverty, but may find themselves more exposed in the suburbs than they imagined.
As to the overall number, 12.6% is a damn high poverty rate already, but consider that the poverty level is federally defined as $15,577 for a family of three, and recall that a full-time minimum wage worker cannot afford a one-bedroom apartment anywhere in the country at average market rates right now, meaning that more than $10,712 must be earned just to rent a one-bedroom apartment. Is it very likely that a family of three living on even $16k (or $17k, or $18k) is not struggling financially, is not what most of us would call poverty-stricken, is not suffering the fates of poverty—juggling paying bills and buying food, avoiding all but the most dire emergency healthcare, no savings, no personal safety net, treading water mightily? We are fooling ourselves if we think that there aren’t many, many more people in this country who are “living in poverty” than our government is willing to recognize.
My Head May Explode
Copycat
Bush says “that success in Iraq depends on victory over extremists.” First it was sneakily trying to repackage the Dems’ Cut & Run as Trim & Saunter, and now he’s stealing the Dems’ midterm campaign strategy.
“Victory Over Extremists” is totally ours, dude!
Disgusting McCain
Way back in March, I posted about Senator Sun-Dried Turd having hired Terry Nelson as an advisor:
After hiring Terry Nelson as an advisor, a bloke who was last seen aiding and abetting Tom DeLay’s money-funneling machinations, McCain appeared on a Seattle radio show where a caller questioned his decision, saying, “For a reformer, I'm kind of curious why he would hire a guy like Terry Nelson as a senior advisor… I'm curious why would you hire someone with such a shady background?”In the interim, McCain has been busily turding it up all over the country, and Nelson produced the infamous bimbo ad attacking Harold Ford, Jr. The ad “provoked charges of racism across the country” and made Nelson “politically radioactive—so much so that Wal-Mart dumped Nelson as a consultant after the controversy exploded. But Nelson's ad hasn't rendered him too radioactive for McCain, apparently.” Because McCain has now chosen Nelson as national campaign manager for his presumed presidential run.
And then the fun began.MCCAIN: None of those charges are true.That’s the way to not look like an asshole—immediately deny that charges you later admit you’ve never heard of aren’t true. Well played, Captain Clever.
CALLER: You don't believe what was actually written in the indictment from Texas?
MCCAIN: No.
CARLSON: All right.
[nervous laughter]
MCCAIN: I will check it out. But I've never heard of such a thing. I know that he was a grassroots organizer for President Bush year 2000 and 2004, and had a very important job in the Bush campaign as late as 2004, but the other charges I will go and look and see if any of them are true, but I've never heard of them before.
Evidently, after his wife was called a junky and his adopted daughter was called his illegitmate black child by the Rove smear machine in 2000, McCain the Maverick decided: If you can’t beat 'em, join 'em. What a trailblazer.
Today in Wev
Gates approved as new Secretary of Defense. Everyone voted for him except Jim Bunning (R-KY) and—wait for it—Rick Santorum, who "took to the Senate floor" after Gates was confirmed to deliver an hourlong speech:
[He warned] of the dangers of not confronting "Islamic fascism" and its budding alliances with anti-American countries such as Venezuela, North Korea and Cuba.It's a crying shame such a brilliant mind just got voted out of the Senate.
"We are sleepwalking through the storm," Santorum said. "How do those who deny this evil propose to save us from these people? By negotiating through the U.N. or directly with Iran? By firing Don Rumsfeld, (and) now getting rid of John Bolton? That's going to solve the problem?"
Christopher Hitchens: Minister of Funny
I almost can’t begin to express the intensity of my profound hatred for Why Women Aren’t Funny nor the depths of my wonder that Vanity Fair is willing to dedicate its pages to an article which sweepingly maligns half of the population. And, like any good piece of resoundingly sexist drivel, Hitchens manages to get in his digs at men, too, who, for example “will laugh at almost anything, often precisely because it is—or they are—extremely stupid.”
In the very first paragraph of the piece, the loathsome Hitchens conveys that women aren’t only just not funny themselves; they are also wholly talentless arbiters of what is funny, too.
Be your gender what it may, you will certainly have heard the following from a female friend who is enumerating the charms of a new (male) squeeze: "He's really quite cute, and he's kind to my friends, and he knows all kinds of stuff, and he's so funny … " (If you yourself are a guy, and you know the man in question, you will often have said to yourself, "Funny? He wouldn't know a joke if it came served on a bed of lettuce with sauce béarnaise.") However, there is something that you absolutely never hear from a male friend who is hymning his latest (female) love interest: "She's a real honey, has a life of her own … [interlude for attributes that are none of your business] … and, man, does she ever make 'em laugh."Let the men be the judge of that joke, sweetie. You just sit there and mind your praiseworthy attributes.
Mr. Shakes, who responded to my query about whether he’d mentioned that I’m funny to his mates when first telling them about me with, “I honestly don’t remember, babe, but I can’t imagine telling someone about you without mentioning it,” was surprised to hear Hitchens’ assertion that he must be wrong, since bragging that your girl is witty “absolutely never” happens. “That dude is living in 1860,” Mr. Shakes sniffed.
By the time Hitchens gets to his suspicion that women are not funny because “produc[ing] babies” gives them “an unchallengeable authority,” and men, being as they are “overawed, not to say terrified” of women’s baby-producing abilities, use humor to mock that authority, I was ready to have a tumbler of whatever he was drinking. By the painful dénouement, which begins with the dismal observation, “For men, it is a tragedy that the two things they prize the most—women and humor—should be so antithetical,” I was ready to knock him over the head with the closest blunt object upon which I could put my delicate female hands. And I was left with little energy to say much else about this piece aside from the obvious, and admittedly humorless: Fuck you, Hitchens.
It occurs to me that men like him seem to write articles like this just so that women like me can issue stern and unfunny responses, thusly proving his thesis. I’m not particularly good at acknowledging my own attributes, but I’ll be damned if I let someone tell me I’m not funny. I know how to tell a joke, and tell it well; I can deliver one-liners off the top of my head with flawless timing, never regretting five minutes later having missed the perfect rejoinder; I even do brilliant pratfalls. I know I’m funny—but I’m simply not amused by being told by a pugnacious pigass I can’t possibly be simply because I have a cunt.
A cunt which, by the way, is herself a piquant raconteur. You wouldn’t believe the jocose tales that fall from her mischievous lips. Oh, the stories she could tell you, Hitchens—but she won’t. She only regales sophisticates of egalitarian character with her uproarious yarns.
The totally not funny Echidne’s got more.
